


The Seas Between Our Shores

by firecat



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: AU - slight canon divergence, Abandonment, Allison Hargreeves (briefly) - Freeform, Ben Hargreeves (briefly) - Freeform, Canonical Character Death, Cunnilingus, Emotional Tether(s), F/F, Family, First Time, Ghosts, Guns, Infidelity, Klaus Hargreeves (briefly) - Freeform, Luther Hargreeves (briefly) - Freeform, Making Out, Mutual Pining, Number Five (briefly), Period-Typical Homophobia, Reginald Hargreeves (briefly), Temporary Amnesia, Torture, powers, shared powers, temporary drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27154486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: In 1963, Vanya Hargreeves remembers nothing of her old life. She's a caregiver for a mute, sensitive boy in a small, unhappy family...and she's half in love with his mother. But then her old life begins to catch up with her. She discovers she has strange, dangerous powers, and they might be contagious.(Note: Canon character death)
Relationships: Sissy Cooper/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17
Collections: Fic In A Box





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yelp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yelp/gifts).



> Thanks for the great prompts; I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Set during season 2.

Vanya wonders if something happened to her when Sissy hit her with the car. Something other than the amnesia, that is.

Mostly, now, she feels fine. Except for having no memories of her past. But every now and then a weird sensation thrills through her. A metallic, high pitched sound. Her vision going all soft around the edges, pulsing with strange light. Her hands tingling, and sometimes she thinks she can see little sparks between her fingers. A big thump in the center of her chest, and a tugging, as if some giant is trying to yank her into the air by pulling on her string.

She sometimes thinks of telling Sissy about the sensations. But she always decides not to. The sensations pass quickly, and Sissy has enough on her mind. Caring for a mute, sensitive boy, and facing the doctors’ judgements about her. 

“They say it’s my fault he’s like this. They call me a ‘refrigerator mother,’” she told Vanya, pain tearing at her face, one evening when she’d had a little too much to drink. “Carl tells me not to believe it, but deep down, I think maybe I do.” 

Speaking of whom, Sissy’s also putting up with an insecure, childish husband who overcompensates with bravado and booze. 

She doesn’t need to carry the burden of Vanya’s worries too.

Every moment Vanya stops to think about it, she is surprised at how comfortable she feels around Sissy and Harlan. She wonders if she’s been a nanny before, because it’s as if she was born for this. Being in the center of a family, even if not strictly part of the family. Helping everything run just that little bit more smoothly. Sometimes she worries that she left another family behind, one that might be starting to fall apart without her. But not when she’s in the midst of it all — reading to Harlan, helping to cook supper, sitting on the porch at sunset drinking an ice tea. 

Or watching Sissy. How her hair streams back in the evening breezes. The sheen of perspiration on her face and shoulders after hanging laundry on a hot afternoon. The little pinch in her forehead when she’s got too many things on her mind at once. The sorrow that shadows her face sometimes, when she thinks no one is looking at her. 

Vanya tries to remember if she had a lover or husband in her lost life. She remembers what acts of love are like, when she sees Sissy and Carl kissing or hugging, but abstractly, not with any familiar face or body attached to them. Lately, though, it’s Sissy’s face and body she imagines. 

She wonders if she should feel bad about that, these sensual feelings about her rescuer, her employer. But she doesn’t. She’s starting to get the impression her feelings and mind don’t work quite the way other people’s do. But maybe that, too, is the result of recovering from a concussion. 

~~~

It’s late at night. Vanya and Sissy sit in the kitchen. Vanya wracks her brains, trying to uncover memories about the huge, seedy-looking man who confronted her in the barn. Who apologized to her, without saying what for, and who simultaneously looked as if he wanted to squeeze her to death with his mighty arms. She’s grateful to Sissy for coming with the rifle. For protecting her.

“You are not the type who’d associate with rough men like that,” Sissy insists. 

“I have no idea who I was.”

And now Sissy is examining her hands, tenderly stroking her palms with her fingertips. 

“These callouses on your fingertips,” Sissy says, touching each one, “I wonder how you got those.”

Suddenly Vanya’s body feels too _full_ of something. The tingling starts in her hands, subtle, but unignorable. It feels like something is passing between her fingertips and Sissy’s. She can’t see anything with her eyes, but it’s as if she can see it with her mind — little tendrils of light. 

Her body feels tight in the middle. Her mouth forgets momentarily how to close. 

“It’s late,” Sissy says. “We should mosey.” She draws her hands away. Perhaps she looks at them a moment, as if she’s never seen them before. Puts on a polite-for-company smile instead of the tender one.

And then, just like that, the moment’s gone. 

Later that night, Vanya hears the metallic sounds in her head again, and she has weird visions. She would almost say memories, but they can’t be memories, because they make no sense. A hand — it looks like her hand — playing a violin. The man from the barn, floating in the air, light blazing from the center of his chest, his face a mask of agony. 

She jerks upright in bed, shaking. The visions dissipate. But the sensations in her body won’t fade. They zing around inside her, as if they’re frantic people, looking for the exit from a burning building and finding none.

And then she has to move. Get out. Go somewhere. Anywhere. In her mind, she sends a silent apologetic thought to Sissy for taking her car. In her mind, she imagines Sissy waking up suddenly, as if she’d heard the thought, and running to the door in her white pajamas. But Vanya doesn’t turn back to look.

~~~

By the time Vanya returns to the farm — is it only two or three days later? — so much has changed. 

Her memories, it seems, have started trying to find her. 

What she’s learned, what she’s done, are almost too big to make any sense. 

_She stopped a bullet._ And flattened an acre of cornfield in the process. 

She met a boy with the demeanor of a middle-aged man, who told her that he and the giant of a man were her brothers-in-arms, and that she had to come with them to help save the world. She had to, because she had caused the end of the world once. 

The one thing that convinces her it might all be real is that she keeps going. Taking one step after another. Instead of lying down in the middle of the road and going catatonic, like she imagines a normal person would, if their world and their place in it had changed so completely. But Vanya has taken in one ridiculous assertion after another, one impossible experience after another, as if they are… _familiar._ She doesn’t remember them, but she can tell there’s space in her body, in her mind, built in for them. 

The man-boy told her — and the three pale wraiths of men who chased her through the cornfields convinced her — that she was in danger, and might bring that danger to anyone who was near her. 

If she’d been smart, if she’d really cared about Sissy’s and Harlan’s safety, she wouldn’t have gone back to the farm at all. But to make that choice felt impossible. As if her soul were distributed into three different people, and leaving two of them behind would tear her into pieces. 

So she goes back. Sissy, with a basket of freshly laid eggs, runs into her arms, crying “Thank God!” 

For a moment, Vanya’s soul feels whole again. It’s like sinking into a deep, warm tub. 

“You have no idea where my mind went,” Sissy says, her face still full of relief.

Vanya wonders if that’s true.

And then her insides clench. Because she has to tell Sissy. Not all of it, but enough to get her to understand why…she has to leave.

After breakfast. That will be soon enough.

~~~

“I don’t understand,” says Sissy, picking up the breakfast dishes. 

“These guys are really dangerous, and they’re not going to stop until I’m dead,” she tells the woman holding part of her soul, her life force. 

“Vanya! _We_ could go somewhere. For…for a few days,” blurts Sissy, her face written all over with need, as if she too feels their lives, their minds, their bodies cannot be apart, just as Vanya does. 

“You know that’s not right,” says Vanya, although uttering the words feels like taking knives to her insides. 

“Neither is you leaving us!” cries Sissy.

A floorboard creaks then, and Harlan appears in the next room. His little mouth hanging open. He doesn’t speak, but he understands what’s said. He understands “Vanya leaving us.” Vanya, his friend. Vanya, his safety. He’s out the door, and Vanya and Sissy run after him, but it’s as if there are wings on his heels, and he outpaces them. 

Vanya isn’t sure how, but she can sense where he’s gone. Not soon enough, though. When she gets there, all she sees of him is his wooden duck toy floating on the surface of the pond. 

Then it’s happening again, like it did in the cornfield. The sound, the wind. The light pouring out of her center. The difference is, this time she’s not reacting unconsciously in self-defense. This time, she’s doing it on purpose, and on behalf of another. This time she’s calling it forth, her whole mind and body fixed on one purpose: _“I need to get to Harlan. He needs to be okay.”_

The power, sound, energy, whatever it is in her body that lets this happen, surges out of her, and pulls the pond water with it. Not all of it, but enough that she can see Harlan lying there, at the bottom of the basin, amidst the drowned junk of years. 

As she carries him to safety, the water crashes back of its own accord. She feels exhausted, as if she had lifted every drop of that water herself. And, she guesses, she has. 

But she’s not able to rest yet. Because Harlan’s not breathing. She pumps his chest, breathes into his mouth, absolutely sure this is the right thing to do, although she doesn’t remember ever being taught it, any more than she remembers being taught how to lift water into the sky. 

He’s not responding. _He can’t die!_ her mind screams. As she breathes into him for the third time, she feels _something_ pass from herself into his mouth. Perhaps it’s the dregs of her energy, the last drops left over from its massive outpouring only minutes ago. 

She despairs. She howls over the little body. Because she is sure her power can only destroy, not create.

And then Harlan gives a great gasp, and wracking coughs overtake his frame. He’s alive. Vanya feels like she’s come back to life herself. It seems as if a tether has formed beween herself and Harlan, some side effect of her power, perhaps. She’s overcome with relief and awe and disbelief. 

And then Sissy is there, taking Harlan from her arms. “Thank you,” Sissy cries. She and Harlan form a unit as she cradles him, rocks him over and over. Vanya reaches out with her hand, but Sissy is completely occupied with her son. The tether between Vanya and Harlan slackens.


	2. Chapter 2

Sissy’s hysterical sobbing fit seems to have passed. Vanya knows it’s just relief making its way out of her after the scare she had over Harlan earlier. 

Sissy takes a long, grateful drink of the wine Vanya poured for her.

“Where’s yours?” she asks, meaning the wine.

Vanya is silent for a long moment.

“I should leave,” she says. 

Sissy draws in a shuddering breath, shakes her head, as if in disbelief. 

“Do you know what it’s like, when you have a man who can’t see you, a son who won’t talk to you?” she asks, her eyes on the carpet. 

Vanya turns to her, and they make eye contact for the first time since Sissy entered the room. They are drowning in each other’s eyes. 

“Your life gets small,” Sissy says. Her mouth is smiling, but it’s a smile full of bitterness. Full of self-hate. “A little smaller every day. And you don’t even notice the box that you’re in. Until someone comes along and lets you out.” She sobs. “You tell me how you let her go.” 

“Sissy, I can’t,” says Vanya. Knowing somehow, without remembering, that “I can’t” have been the first words out of her mouth in response to everything she ever wanted in life. “I can’t” because they don’t want me to. “I can’t” because I have to make myself small, smaller even than Sissy’s box. “I can’t” because I will become too angry. “I can’t” because I will hurt, I will kill, I will destroy.

Too often, “I can’t” has been the end of it, whatever it was that Vanya was offered, that Vanya thought she wanted. But not this time. 

Sissy doesn’t care. Sissy doesn’t even hear. Sissy just takes what she wants, and what she wants is Vanya’s mouth on hers.

And this time, Vanya can.

She takes the half-empty wine glass from Sissy’s hand, sets it on the table, and kisses her in return. Their hands are not sure what to do at first, and hover between them. And then they do know.

They spend a long time on the couch, in the dim golden light of the table lamps. Exploring each other’s mouths, faces, hair, tracing the shape of each other’s bodies over their clothes. They’re hungry, so hungry, but they want to savor each moment, each taste, each texture, each sound they pull from each other.

“Is it your first time doing this?” asks Sissy, shuddering with pleasure as Vanya kisses and licks her neck. “With a woman, I mean?”

Vanya chuckles. “It’s only in fairy tales that kissing wakes the princess up from sleep,” she says softly as her tongue traces Sissy’s ear. “I don’t remember if it’s my first time.”

“Of course, that was so silly of me, I’m sorry!” Sissy whispers. “I’m a little addlepated right now!” 

“Whyever would that be?” teases Vanya. Her hand moves down Sissy’s torso, over the blouse, over the breast that she hungers to see, to touch, to kiss. “Even if I regain my memories,” she continues, as her mouth follows her hand, “I will always think of you as my first.”

“You are my first too,” Sissy whispers. “Except in my dreams.”

“How about your daydreams?” Vanya wants to know. She unbuttons the top button of Sissy’s blouse, traces her fingertip over the lace at the edge of the bra. 

“I used to daydream about kissing women,” Sissy says, undoing the next button for Vanya. “But not for a long time. Until…until you came.”

“Oho, you’ve been thinking about kissing me all this time?” Vanya says playfully.

“From morning til night,” says Sissy. “When I’m washing the dishes. Collecting the eggs. Watering the garden. Sometimes even when I’m reading to Harlan,” she confesses. “Especially when he wants to hear the fairy tales with the princes and princesses. One time I caught myself saying ‘princess’ when I meant to say ‘prince’!”

“Did he protest?” Vanya wants to know.

“You know, usually he does protest if I read the story wrong. But this time, he didn’t. He just looked up at me with those fathomless eyes, and gave me a little smile.”

“Your kid is definitely a changeling,” says Vanya. She undoes another button of the blouse, and mouths a breast through the thin bra.

“I think it’s time we took this to the bedroom, don’t you?” suggests Sissy, running her hand through Vanya’s hair, which presses her mouth a little more firmly over Sissy’s breast. “You must be getting hot in that thick sweatshirt of yours.”

“I’m hot,” says Vanya, “But I think taking the sweatshirt off will only make me hotter.”

“Then I’ll soothe you with a lovely, cool tongue bath,” Sissy promises.

~~~

Sissy is naked, spread out across the queen-sized bed, luxuriating in how much space she has.

“Carl always hogs three fourths of the bed, and nine tenths of the blankets,” she complains.

“Hush,” says Vanya. “We’re not talking about Carl tonight.” She lifts Sissy’s legs onto her shoulders, and marvels at the beauty she reveals. She pets the inviting pale hair hiding Sissy’s sex, darker skin surrounding a tease of pink. Tickles her fingers over Sissy’s folds. 

Sissy moans. “You must have done this before,” she says. “You sure seem like you know what you’re doing.”

“I have one of these too, you know.” She doesn’t want Sissy to keep on bringing up her past. Fortunately, she knows just how to get her to think about something else. She tastes Sissy with long, slow laps. Sissy’s whole body shudders, and the room fills with quiet moans. Vanya isn’t sure whose they are. 

She keeps licking, and feels Sissy’s thighs tense around her. She wants to make Sissy come, wants it so much. 

And then she starts feeling it again. A hum, and the tip of her tongue, teasing Sissy’s clit, is tingling as if she’d just scuffed over a polyester carpet in the dead of winter. Sissy moans loudly — too loudly, if they want to make sure Harlan stays asleep. The sensation spreads through Vanya’s whole body too. It’s like she’s making love to Sissy with her whole body, her whole vital essence, via her tongue.

Sissy starts shaking all over. Vanya wonders if she should stop, but then she knows she can’t, even if their lives depended on it. She laps a little harder, and slides two fingers inside Sissy’s wet pussy. Now the energy is coming out of her fingers too. 

“Ohh, Sissy,” Vanya sighs, muffled because her mouth is sealed around Sissy’s sex.

Sissy comes. A single loud shriek escapes her, and then she’s covered her face with a pillow to muffle herself, but she’s continuing to scream, with as much abandon as any Maenad, as Vanya continues stroking her inside, prolonging her orgasm. She imagines she sees light, streaming from her body, through her fingers, and into Sissy’s core. 

What if she isn’t imagining it? she suddenly thinks, and an ice-cold sweat breaks out on her skin. What if this is her power, and what if it’s damaging Sissy? 

“Come here, come here, come here, Vanya,” Sissy begs. When Vanya crawls up toward her, Sissy snatches her, covers her face with kisses, gasping “Nothing has ever felt so good, Vanya, no one has ever made me feel so good, oh my God, thank you, you are such a gift to me, you sweet woman.”

Vanya lets go of her fear a little bit. Surely something that made Sissy so happy couldn’t be all bad. And besides, Sissy is in a hurry to return the favor. 

Sissy makes love to her, worshiping and exclaiming in wonder over her slender body, all angles and wiry muscles, as if the softness in her has been eaten by the power that lives within her. 

Vanya just lets go. Maybe she will need to leave. Maybe she’ll never have a moment of peace and sweetness again, with someone who wants the same things she does. But she has it now, and she’s not going to let anything take it from her. 

Sounds and tingles and tugging within her. Seeing Sissy’s face, and tongue, and fingers, glowing with sparks of light, on the occasions she opens her eyes. She lets it all go and lets herself be dragged under by the pleasure Sissy’s fingers and mouth and eager body are giving her. Submits to being taken care of. Lets the need in, opens to it, allows it to take her until she bursts forth. Coming feels like being carried by a great winged being across the sky.


	3. Chapter 3

Sissy wakes up before Vanya, bringing coffee to bed. 

Everything’s new, thinks Vanya. Is that why she sees something a little different about Sissy? There’s an edge of purpose in her that Vanya hasn’t seen often before. A hint of irritation? A rejection of the mundane, where she used to embrace it completely? Where she would have been rushing to set about her chores, today she’s insisting that she’s earned a day off. 

Also, she doesn’t want to talk. 

“Talking makes things real,” she says. 

Vanya talks anyway. 

“What if we could go somewhere safe for Harlan, where we could be together like this?” she says, stroking Sissy’s arm, feeling Sissy stroke hers. Vanya isn’t sure if the shivers are from the cold morning air, or whatever was (still is?) passing between them, or the elation of being together with this woman she has longed for. 

It’s forgotten in the flurry of setting-things-to-right that takes place when Carl comes home early from his business trip.

He wants to boast about his success, as usual. Which is better than when he wants to deny he’s to blame for a failure. But this time it seems to get on Sissy’s last nerve. 

“How could Vanya have heard about your sale, Carl? She doesn’t subscribe to _Showerheads Today.”_

The tension in the room thickens, like pea soup left too long on the stove. 

Carl puts his hands and mouth all over Sissy as she washes dishes. Instead of helping with the dishes, like a caring lover or friend would.

Harlan seems to be ignoring the adults, playing with an electricity game, the object of which is to light up a bulb that doubles as a clown nose. The game makes irritating buzzing noises. 

Finally Vanya can stand it no more and snaps Carl’s name. 

And she does not expect what happens. Sissy giving her a cold look and demanding that she stay out of it. 

Even Carl is surprised. “Sissy, what the hell’s going on with you?” 

The sounds and tingles start again. Only this time it’s different. Instead of feeling it inside her body, Vanya feels it all around her, as if she’s a lightning conductor in a brewing storm — and so is Sissy, and so is Harlan. She hears the sound of thunder. 

More sounds. Sissy and Carl yelling at each other. Slamming the furniture. Electricity buzzing. Then the sound of glass cracking in the window over the sink, where sunlight is streaming through.

Two days ago, Vanya would have put the glass cracking down to a freak wind phenomenon. Yesterday, Vanya might have worried that the weird powers she was manifesting had done it.

Today, it might have been any of them. Her, Sissy, Harlan. It might have been all of them together. 

The tension eases a little, but Sissy’s anger is still there under the skin. 

“I’m spending the day with my _family,”_ she says to Vanya. “Not you,” she does not say aloud. Because she doesn’t need to say it aloud for it to be understood. 

~~~

“How do you guys deal with this?” Vanya asks the two newest siblings she’s found out about. They’re drinking and wasting time inside Allison’s beauty salon. Because apparently that’s what you do when you and your siblings are the only ones who know the world’s going to end in six days. 

Klaus imperiously waves a flask in the air. “I get really high. Allison lies to herself. And you? You suppress all your emotions deep, deep down until you blow shit up.”

Vanya doesn’t remember, but she doesn’t doubt, either. It hits too close to home. It _feels_ like something she’d do. 

What does it mean that she might have given that same “blowing-shit-up” ability to her new family? 

Well. The people she wants to be her new family. Pretty obvious they don’t think of her that way right now. Even after she and Sissy shared those moments…was it really only last night?

Maybe _especially_ because they shared those moments. Maybe that scares Sissy now. 

Or maybe, whatever she gave Sissy with their lovemaking has stirred things up in her, to the point where she doesn’t want to be family to anyone. Vanya thinks Sissy must not have had time to develop much of a self-identity. She remembers Sissy telling her of her dream of working at a department store. For all that Vanya knew nothing of her own past at the time, it felt like a small dream to her. One, she realizes, she longed to lift Sissy up from. (Was that really the wish of someone who loved?)

“Yeah, I’d really like to not do that anymore,” Vanya drawls. Doing exactly what Klaus just told her she does — suppressing her emotions, instead of communicating them.

“You’ve got six days, Missy,” Klaus reminds her.

A lightning bolt of purpose electrifies her.

“I’m going to tell her that I love her,” Vanya announces. 

The world breaks into song and dance, and it seems like everything’s going to be all right again.

~~~

But that night is everything that family shouldn’t be.

Probing questions. “Where have you been?” Judgements. “Are you _drunk?”_

Vanya tries to talk about her feelings. Sissy slams the lid on them so hard, Vanya feels like a garbage dumpster being shut to cover up its noxious odors. 

“Now’s not a good time.” 

Everything that family shouldn’t be. Even though Vanya doesn’t remember what her family life used to be like. She knows that it shouldn’t involve feeling like a third wheel. Seeing someone she thought was _hers_ vanish into a bedroom with someone else. It shouldn’t involve throwing away feelings. Throwing away love. Throwing away the one fleeting chance at a life that was true and good. 

Everything that family shouldn’t be. Accusations. “You _slept_ with him? You slept with _him?”_ Half-truths. “He’s still my husband.” Shaming. “I see you _miserable.”_ Denial. “Honey, that was just morning talk.” 

Denial. “I can’t.”

Vanya’s out the door. The tether she feels to Sissy, to Harlan, is pulling painfully at her. It burns, as if it were a fiery arrow in her chest. But she can’t be there. Can’t be in that house of death. 

She’s not even sure she believes in this other family she’s supposedly a part of. Never mind their crazy notion that the world’s going to end in six days. Double never mind their even wilder notion that they can put a stop to that. 

But they have something Sissy no longer seems to have. Something that Vanya can’t create herself, and that she desperately needs.

They still have hope.


	4. Chapter 4

Vanya assumes she’ll never see Sissy again, and knows it is for the best. Her presence put Sissy, and Harlan, and Carl in danger.

But when she leaves the torture of a so-called “family” dinner with the monster Vanya was told was their father, Sissy is waiting for her. 

That feeling of being _tethered_ to Sissy, deep inside her chest, returns with a _snap,_ as if seeing her causes all the slack in the connection to be taken up. 

Vanya knows she shouldn’t go with Sissy, but leaving her there feels like biting off a limb. So she lets Sissy take her. Then they’re parked somewhere amidst trees, a light rain hissing against the roof of the car.

“Whatever this is,” Sissy says, “Vanya, it’s dangerous.” She twists her hands, as if they don’t belong to her.

Vanya doesn’t know what _this_ means. Their love affair? Their shared energy? (Is there a difference?)

“They do not abide women like us around here. Some of us don’t get to have the life we want.”

That “I can’t” is still between them. Smothering. 

“I won’t let anything happen to you or Harlan.” Vanya feels the truth of this in every cell in her body. If it’s the last thing she does, if she has to give up her life, if she has to destroy everyone else in the universe.

Their bodies pull them together then; they’re in each other’s arms, taking pleasure from each other and giving it back again. Energy is pouring through them, mixing and blending, and they’re becoming something more than their individual selves, souls, bodies. 

Vanya sees little flashes of light in the trees, and isn’t sure what they are, and doesn’t care.

~~~

Back at the farm the next day, Vanya’s aware of a new sensation in her body. As if someone were sighting a rifle, aiming between her shoulder blades.

Not someone. Carl. 

He doesn’t know all of what’s happening; he only sees the tip of the iceberg. But he has an animal sense that he’s about to lose something. And that makes him dangerous. 

Vanya can feel tension coiling in Sissy when he demands Vanya accompany him to Jim’s. Vanya remembers the family dinner, where she demonstrated her power and blew up the centerpiece. What’s gathering in Sissy now feels bigger than that, and she’s afraid of what might happen if Sissy feels threatened.

She agrees to go with Carl. She gazes at Sissy, willing her to accept this, and hears her voice in Sissy’s mind, through their connection, saying “It’s okay. We’ll work out another plan to sneak off together.” She feels Sissy’s tension slacken a little. The immediate danger has passed. But they don’t have a lot of time. 

Carl parks at the end of the lane leading to Jim’s house. Carl gets out, stands by the fence inspecting the cattle. He rambles, spinning an elaborate metaphor of a threat, as if he were a James Bond villain instead of a second-rate salesman. 

“You gotta fight the disease before it spreads,” he tells Vanya. 

“Who I am is not a disease,” she replies. 

But she wonders. Not because she loves another woman, which is what Carl thinks they’re talking about. No.

Because she believes she’s passed her powers — or are they a curse? to two people. 

Because she doesn’t know how to control the power. How to do anything with it that isn’t excessive. Dangerous. Damaging. Whether it’s blowing up the moon, which her siblings told her she did, or blowing up the centerpiece, which she saw herself do. 

And if she can’t control it — or even control whether she passes it to others — how can she teach anyone else how to?

“It ain’t natural,” says Carl. “And it ain’t happening under my roof. Not with my wife.” 

Except it is happening. 

“I expect you to be packed up and gone,” he tells her. “Or I’ll take Harlan away.” 

The energy roils through Vanya. _You could just get rid of him,_ it whispers. _Listen to the wind in the wheat. There’s so much power here. It would be easy._

She pushes the temptation, the anger, away. No. Maybe he’s right. If she leaves, they’ll go back to —

Normal? But what about the new powers in Sissy? Possibly also in Harlan? 

Her siblings told her she unleashed her power out of anger at being mistreated.

How would Sissy react, when the whole world was set up not only to mistreat her, but to deny her very existence? How would Harlan react, when the whole world felt like a threat to him? 

She can’t just leave them. She has to find a way through. 

~~~

She’s speeding back to the farm, hoping she and Sissy and Harlan can run before Carl gets back. 

At a turning of the road, she passes her sibling, the one they call Number Five — she doesn’t even know his real name. 

He demands that she come with him, leave Sissy and Harlan behind. “Doomsday will happen if you don’t,” Number Five says.

Doomsday might happen if she does.

“I can’t just leave my friends here.” How does she explain that this ‘can’t’ is so much more than a social nicety? That she can’t tear their connection to pieces; she can’t leave two-thirds of herself and her destructive powers in one timeline and one-third in another. 

“They can’t come with us. They belong in this timeline,” Number Five insists.

Maybe the thing she’s becoming part of feels the threat to its integrity, because she’s powering up and doesn’t remember why.

So is he. But somehow, they contain it. He lets her go with a stern warning not to be late.

~~~

When she and Harlan and Sissy are together in the car at last, it feels like a circuit connects. Vanya can sense their thoughts as if they’re speaking out loud. (Even Harlan, who doesn’t speak out loud.)

“I left a note for Carl,” says Sissy guiltily, as they roll toward the roadblock. “I told him we are leaving. I owed him that.”

Vanya knows that the note was an epitaph for who Sissy used to be. It will complicate things. But she’s inside Sissy’s head now. Inside her heart. She understands Sissy could make no other choice. 

“Get out of the car,” Sissy’s cop brother-in-law demands of Vanya. “I ain’t asking you again.” He cocks his rifle.

Energy pours through Vanya’s body. She draws on the tether. A blaze of light rings her chest. The bullets coming out of the officers’ rifles can’t even get near her. She knocks the men down. 

“Vanya!” Sissy shouts in warning.

Before the butt of the rifle hits her, Vanya feels the tether between them — her and Sissy and Harlan — change.

It’s no longer just a connection.

Now it’s a flow-through. 

A mind comes to life, more than the sum of the three of them. It’s still an inexperienced mind, not sure of what it can do, or what to think about what it encounters. But it believes in itself. It will grow, and learn.


	5. Chapter 5

The young mind is in agony.

A concept filters in from one of its stores of memories. _Hell._ What else could this be? 

Part of its physical form — the part called Vanya — is being tortured. Electroshocked. She’s hallucinating. People keep asking her questions, and she doesn’t know the answers. 

The mind’s other parts are in agony too. Especially the youngest, Harlan, the one who has more sensory awareness and less language. Everything Vanya’s experiencing is heightened in him. He doesn’t fight it, because he doesn’t know it’s wrong. But the mind fears it will damage him, twist him permanently into pain. 

The part of the mind that calls herself Sissy ignores Carl’s hand on her back. She’s in three places at once, seeing through Vanya’s eyes, feeling through Harlan’s sensorium. She blazes inside with a strange new purpose.

But even with all its power, the mind can’t stop what’s happening. Can’t stop the agony. Not yet.

In the drug-induced hallucination Vanya’s having, she is sitting alone at the dinner table, looking with fear and revulsion at the brain on her plate. 

“You choose to live in a fantasy, a land of make-believe where you don’t have to face up to who you really are,” lectures the man her siblings call Father.

 _I tried to live there, but it doesn’t work,_ the mind of Vanya protests. _Who I am part of now is bigger than that. Bigger than you. Bigger than all of us. I’m afraid of what it might become if it’s fed anything more. More...memories._

“One more bite and you can go,” says Father, inexorable. 

Vanya cuts a piece of the brain and puts it in her mouth.

 _I remember,_ the young mind says then, and it matures the equivalent of many years in a handful of seconds.

At first, it can’t control the energy at its disposal, from Vanya and Sissy and Harlan, all raised to the third power. 

It is aware of Vanya’s siblings struggling to reach her. They can’t. There’s _too much_ of it.

It’s Ben who reaches them. 

Ben understands. Ghosts live among the threads of energy the triple mind is made from.

He looks into the mind tenderly, sees it as the child it is. The terrible, devouring child.

He knows it will devour him, and he knows it will set him free, and he shows it how to accept him into itself. 

“Dad treated you as a bomb before you ever were one,” Ben says, and the child knows being so named caused it to become the bomb it is now (for all that it is so much more). The child also understands that Ben’s presence has started a process that will unmake the bomb, allow choice and control to emerge in its place. Like tendrils unfold from the branch of a vine, to reach out farther for the sun.

Then Ben lets go of the threads of energy holding him together, ready at last, and blends into the ethereal breezes. 

~~~

“You don’t get to ask for more!” Carl demands.

His mind is choked with fear and desperation, and the only way he knows how to express that to his wife is with threats, assertions of ownership. 

He and Sissy struggle for the rifle and it accidentally fires. The child-mind watches as the projectile floats toward the part of itself called Harlan. It is reminded of the way Harlan’s wooden duck floats on the surface of the bath water when Harlan splashes in it. The mind splashes the bullet back the way it came.

The bullet strikes Carl, and the mind watches as the part of Carl made of thoughts, feelings, dreams, regrets separates from the flesh, and is caught by the ethereal breezes. It sees the body of Carl collapse as its motivating force dissipates.

The new child experiences a strange, many-layered sensation. It understands these are _feelings,_ and they pour into it from the human bodies and minds that are part of it now. Relief, one of the feelings is called. At the same time, its opposite, fear. Sorrow, for the disintegration of Carl, the dissipation of his potential, because even damaged beings have potential. Satisfaction, as that same event — the snuffing of a candle flame into wisps of smoke — means “He won’t be able to hurt us any more.” Guilt, because humans don’t like facing that part of themselves, the desire for revenge that grows from mistreatment. From abandonment.

One part of it is struggling more than the others. The part called Harlan is too young, its internal connections too raw and sensitive, these _feelings_ something too complex to understand. Harlan reacts instinctively, trying to cocoon himself, to build a nest inside which he’ll be safe. But he doesn’t know how to build it properly. In his body, energy surges, swirls, rebounds against itself. He’s flinging off most of what he’s taking, and what he flings off is filled with _feelings._ Light blazes out, and he, his cocoon, are dangerous, the same way Vanya used to be a bomb.

“Help me!” Harlan cries. 

Vanya is the only one with a hope of containing what Harlan’s generating, and she has to touch him to do it. At first her siblings try to stop her from reaching him. Someday perhaps the new mind she’s part of will understand why they decide to come with her after all. But it doesn’t understand yet.

When Vanya touches Harlan touches Sissy, the maelstrom is soothed at last. Harlan’s cocoon is sucked into Vanya’s body. 

The child-mind needs rest then, and loosens its grip on awareness. 

Vanya, Sissy, and Harlan are three beings again, instead of one.

But they’ll never be fully apart again. Never abandoned.

~~~

Harlan is asleep. Vanya and Sissy are lying in each other’s arms, touching each other’s bodies with their fingers, their mouths. Knitting together their connection that was formed the first time they did this. 

It soon will be strong enough to hold across space, and across time. 

They cannot be in the same spacetime. Vanya’s family is in too much danger. She owes it to them to join them in the future. And Sissy wants to pursue her own dreams, the ones she wasn’t able to speak of before, or even think of. They were locked in a part of her mind surrounded by walls of fear and impossibility. Those walls are gone now, also part of the ethereal breezes that carry Ben, Carl, all those who no longer live, all dreams and fears that no longer haunt those they once lived within. 

“You have given me the greatest gift of a lifetime,” Sissy says to Vanya, in the glow of what they created when they pleasured each other.

They sense it’s a gift that transcends lifetimes, but they still prefer to talk of mundane things, and let what will be grow how it will. 

“The gift wasn’t mine to give,” Vanya objects. Sometimes she still doesn’t feel like it’s her, this power she carries. 

“You brought it to me,” says Sissy. “You opened the door to my dreams.”

“We did it together,” Vanya says.

“Find a safe way back to me,” Sissy says. “Again and again.”

~~~

In one of her rare quiet moments, back in the point in spacetime called Earth 2019, Vanya closes her eyes, opens her connection to Sissy and Harlan.

They are driving on a long, lonely highway. A sign by the side of the road says “Welcome to New Mexico.”

They smile as they feel Vanya join them. She is always with them, and they are always with her, but when they focus on each other, the mind they are a part of thrums with power and new purpose, integrating what it’s learned and building something not one of them can yet understand. 

Vanya and Harlan play with his wooden duck, sending it skittering around in the car, surging on the air the way it sometimes surfs the bathtub water when Harlan splashes.


End file.
